


Permutato Orbe Terrarum

by cryptologicalMystic



Category: Original Work, X-Men Evolution
Genre: Gen, Unreliable Narrator, X-Men Evolution References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 20:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11215602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptologicalMystic/pseuds/cryptologicalMystic
Summary: "[WP] A surprising amount of the American population, you included, has gained the strange ability to transform into anything they choose to, fictional or not. You read a lot of Marvel Comics as a child."Humans fear the unknown. Humans fear what's different. How are things supposed to go any better in reality than they did in fiction, especially with the knowledge that absolute power corrupts absolutely?Mind you, though, an undeletable social media post may not have been the best way of addressing these concerns.Produced as a part of fannish culture.





	Permutato Orbe Terrarum

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [[WP] A surprising amount of the American population, you included, has gained the strange ability to transform into anything they choose to, fictional or not. You read a lot of Marvel Comics as a child.](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/300165) by AlternateGallade. 



> I altered the latter half of the prompt a bit, since I'm not really familiar with comics canon. I also tried to go with a writing style different from my normal one to some degree. I typed 'New York' as 'New Yourk' and then had to edit it back LITERALLY EVERY TIME I WROTE IT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME TODAY
> 
> also yes i know i should be working on crystallum cadens i think i have writer's block

[Transcript of a document posted simultaneously to multiple popular websites and/or social networks, including Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter (the latter via a link to Pastebin), all under the username 'Kainotophobic*Lacuna'. (It should be noted that this username keeps the same formatting in all cases, despite the fact that most of the websites where the document appeared forbid asterisks in usernames, and several automatically decapitalize non-lowercase letters.)]

[In all cases, the document has resisted all attempts at deletion. It is not currently known how this is being accomplished, or whether the method being used can indeed be determined.]

[The author of the document has yet to be successfully traced; based on the document's content, however, it is believed that they are outside the reach of current (non-anomalous) technology.]

I'll start this thing off by saying: If you're a shapeshifter, RUN. Get off the grid, get off the planet, hide yourself and your family and any close friends. Turn into something immortal that can hide from anything, that can take you as far from Earth as you can get. You can do that now. You can do a whole lot of things that everyone used to think wasn't possible. And that's what worries me.

When I was a kid, I used to love X-Men. Still do. I couldn't read the comics - there weren't stores near me that sold 'em as far as I knew - but let me tell you, I watched every damn episode of X-Men: Evolution. I wrote a billion bad fanfics and I uploaded every last one to some ancient archive hosted on Geocities, and I ain't ashamed at all, yeah? I was so goddamn angry at the anti-mutant bigot villains. Kelly and his crew. "Mutants are people, too! They've got no right to discriminate against people just because they have superpowers!" and all that.

Except I'm older now, hopefully wiser now, and now this is reality - me staring at my hands, shifting them back and forth between metal and flesh, as the TV plays news of a world in panic. We got lucky, didn't we? No politicians, nobody in the armed forces, nobody tied to the government in a way that means they have to legally obey the chain of command. Nobody with a criminal record beyond things like jaywalking or speeding. Nobody currently in prison. No little kids. 326 million people in the US, 16.3 million of them are shapeshifters. That's 5% of America, and not one of us in those categories. I don't know what the chances are of that, but I'm guessing they're astronomical, yeah? Somebody, some god or fairy or random omnipotent alien space bat, _chose_ us specifically. Chose _good people_ , or at least people who act good, who don't have to follow the orders of the unchosen.

But that just makes us scarier, to the people who were left behind. Think: _we're the mutants_. If it was only _just_ the shapeshifting, we'd be screwing physics over as it is - but we keep testing our limits or getting them tested and _no one's found any_. No limit on number of forms we can take. No clause forbidding us from staying in a form longer than two hours or whatever. Nothing keeping us from turning into something whose powers flip off logic even more. I turned into a teleporting spaceship today and blipped over to Pluto for an hour and when I blipped back the clock on my wall agreed exactly with the watch I'd brought, so we can go faster than light _at the very least_. I've seen reports of people in the shape of superheroes and wizards and only random-omnipotent-alien-space-bat knows what else. We're less shapeshifter and more reality warper.

We're the mutants. We're the ones that shake up all the hard-won knowledge that humanity has been wringing from the universe ever since some caveman knocked two rocks together and discovered that you didn't need to wait for lightning to get a fire. We're unpredictable, we're unlimited. We're something that's never been seen before, something that's not the norm, so of course people are going to fear us, governments are going to want us under their control, well mostly the American government because that's literally the only place we showed up and I don't know what that ROASB was _thinking_ if it decided to put us in the country whose government is being wracked by like five scandals a day but politics isn't really the point here, yeah?

Related to that last bit: did you know that there are people rioting in fear in basically everywhere? They don't want American witchcraft to nuke the world, because that's what you get when you take sixteen million assorted humans, in all our fallible humanity, and make them gods. We really are lucky that the ROASB did a specific selection process, I guess. Its preference for "good people" might give us a few days or weeks before some genius tries to solve world hunger and accidentally covers New York or Tokyo with flesh-eating broccoli/spinach/kale/strawberries or whatever because let's get real if it's not going to be New York or Tokyo it's going to be London because it's always one of those three.

Bottom line: There's no place for shapeshifters on Earth. There's gonna be Kellies everywhere, and ROASB selection process or no I wouldn't be surprised if there's at least one Magneto by now. Take your loved ones with you, or at least make them safe, or don't do that if they're assholes I guess, and find yourself an abode of some sort in space.

If you're a social person and don't want to be stuck out in space with that limited a circle, or if you just want to meet someone else: I'll be on Pluto. Feel free to meet me there.

Cheers,

KL


End file.
